I was under the impression that Germanic languages might have descended from Scandinavia down into Germany. I see that is not necessarily the consensus any more.

Quote from: Wikipedia

No homogeneous contribution to the Germanic-speaking northerners has been determined, while earlier notions holding proto-Germanic peoples to have emigrated from Denmark during the Northern Bronze Age have been abandoned by archaeologists.

I've been finding U106 STR diversity as young in Scandinavia, when compared to the Low Countries, the rest of Continental Europe or the British Isles.

Perhaps there is an alignment with expansions of U106 and Germanic languages, but not necessarily out of Scandinavia.

What do we know about the whereabouts of the beginnings of the Germanic culture?

I also see where there is a theory that the people of the Nordwestblock may have been a buffer holding Germanic speakers out of the Frisian area until fairly late, not completely giving into Germanic settlement until about 250 BC.

Quote from: Wikipedia

It is uncertain when Germanic began to gain a foothold in the area. The Nordwestblock region north of the Rhine is traditionally conceived as belonging to the realms of the Northern Bronze Age, with the Harpstedt Iron Age generally assumed to represent the Germanic precedents west of the Jastorf culture. The general development converged with the emergence of Germanic within other previously Northern Bronze Age regions to the east, maybe also involving a certain degree of Germanic cultural diffusion....The issue still remains unresolved and so far no conclusive evidence has been forwarded to support any alternative.

As I recall, Mallory's book, In Search of the Indo-Europeans, associates the Jastorf and Harpstedt cultures with the beginnings of the Germanic languages. I believe Jastorf was part of the Nordic Bronze Age thing and began in the southern neck of the Jutland Peninsula, later spreading south into North Germany and, later, west into East Friesland.

If the Kurgan Theory is correct, then probably mostly U106 and I1 populations were converted to the obvious thrills of IE speech by intrepid and elite R1a Corded Ware Berlitz, Pimsleur, and Rosetta Stone language instructors. ;-)

Oh, I want to avoid the threat of a severe spanking! There could have been some P312 guys involved and no doubt some E1b1bs, some G2s, some Js, and almost anything else. And no doubt all of them got to Ireland very early, probably by 5:00 am at the latest.

The really important thing about Proto-Germanic is that it is late (c. 500 BC). We can surmise that IE-speakers were in Scandinavia from the Bronze Age. They probably spoke a dialect of IE little or no different from the IE speakers in Western Europe at that stage. The Bell Beaker Culture spread over a great swathe of Europe and was inter-connected by trade routes and long-distance travel. The people who took Bell Beaker to SW Norway would have been able to talk to the BB people in Portugal, France, etc. and I doubt if they would have had much difficulty chatting with people in the Corded Ware Culture. In the Bronze Age these IE speakers were close to the root of PIE in chronology. To quote myself:

Quote

A language develops within a communicating group. In the days before modern transport and the nation state, a communicating group could not cover a vast territory. The area in which Proto-Germanic evolved was far smaller than the spread of its daughter languages today. We would expect a linguistic boundary to also be a cultural boundary. So the finger points at the Nordic Bronze Age (1730-500 BC) as the cradle of Proto-Germanic. It was a comfortable cradle for many a year. The Nordic Bronze Age began in a welcoming warmth. An earlier climate shift made Southern Scandinavia as warm as present-day central Germany. Groups of people from the widespread Corded Ware and Bell Beaker Cultures had moved north into Jutland and the coasts of what are now Norway and Sweden. There they melded with descendants of the Funnel Beaker and Ertebølle people into a rich Bronze Age culture. The wealth and technical excellence of its bronze objects is impressive. Trade was important to this society. So was seacraft. Voyages linked Jutland and Scandia in one communicating web.

However the climate gradually deteriorated, bringing increasingly wetter and colder times to Jutland, culminating in so steep a decline in the decades around 700 BC that much agricultural land was abandoned and bog built up. Pollen history reveals a similar picture in Southern Sweden. Around 500 BC forest encroached on areas that had long been farmland. Meanwhile an influence from eastern Sweden reached the southern Baltic shores in the Late Bronze Age, providing a clue to where some of the Scandinavian farmers were going.

Scandinavia was not utterly deserted in this period. Hunters and fishermen could survive where farming failed. Farming continued on some dry ridges, but it seems that many farmers shifted southward. If pre-Proto-Germanic-speakers began spilling south out of Jutland, they would soon encounter the iron-working Celts expanding northwards. The Jastorf Culture seems to be the result. This was an Iron Age culture in what is now north Germany c. 600-0 BC. Though clearly evolving out of the Nordic Bronze Age, elements of the (Celtic) Halstatt Culture are detectable. This was probably the time in which Proto-Germanic borrowed the Celtic words for "iron" and "king".

So Proto-Germanic in the end was crafted out of crisis. It seems that its final development was in the compact region of the Jastorf Culture. But by the time Tactitus wrote, Germania was far larger. The border between the Roman Empire and Germania was the river Rhine. An expanding language tends to split into dialects, as the spread becomes too wide for constant communication. Eventually these dialects develop into separate languages.

The 1000 BC Urnfield gravesite near Hannover was a combination of I / U106 / R1a men.

Actually we don't know for sure. SNPS were not tested. The STRs were predicted to be those haplogroups by Dirk Schweitzer, Lichtenstein Cave Data Analysis (2008), but doubts were expressed by various people, so I ended up more cautious in my aDNA table.

If the Kurgan Theory is correct, then probably mostly U106 and I1 populations were converted to the obvious thrills of IE speech by intrepid and elite R1a Corded Ware Berlitz, Pimsleur, and Rosetta Stone language instructors. ;-)

Since Gimbutas hadn't heard of R1a1 in the 1950s, I take it that you refer to the "Parochial interpretation of the Kurgan Theory" that made a sudden appearance on another thread. I'd no idea what this meant, but I think I see the light now. This is code for the ravings of Rah-Rah-R1a1arians, yes? All very tiresome, but I can't think why anyone is taking them seriously.

The great Italian-Greek poet Ugo Foscolo, who was a genius, didn’t like the famous poet Vincenzo Monti, who was popular but not genial, reproving him for not knowing Ancient Greek and having used for his famous translation of Iliad a previous translation...

If you'd like to start a new topic, fine, but let's stick to this one here. Grazie.

If the Kurgan Theory is correct, then probably mostly U106 and I1 populations were converted to the obvious thrills of IE speech by intrepid and elite R1a Corded Ware Berlitz, Pimsleur, and Rosetta Stone language instructors. ;-)

Since Gimbutas hadn't heard of R1a1 in the 1950s, I take it that you refer to the "Parochial interpretation of the Kurgan Theory" that made a sudden appearance on another thread. I'd no idea what this meant, but I think I see the light now. This is code for the ravings of Rah-Rah-R1a1arians, yes? All very tiresome, but I can't think why anyone is taking them seriously.

Yes, the Kurgan Theory of Gimbutas has no mention of Y haplogroups. David Anthony's PIE homeland and expansion theories also have no mention of Y haplogroups.

Perhaps we should refer to the association of R1a with Kurgans and IE as Anatole Klyosov's R1a theory. Spencer Wells can probably take some credit as well.

The really important thing about Proto-Germanic is that it is late (c. 500 BC)....

Quote from: Jean M

A language develops within a communicating group. In the days before modern transport and the nation state, a communicating group could not cover a vast territory. The area in which Proto-Germanic evolved was far smaller than the spread of its daughter languages today. We would expect a linguistic boundary to also be a cultural boundary. So the finger points at the Nordic Bronze Age (1730-500 BC) as the cradle of Proto-Germanic. It was a comfortable cradle for many a year. The Nordic Bronze Age began in a welcoming warmth. An earlier climate shift made Southern Scandinavia as warm as present-day central Germany. Groups of people from the widespread Corded Ware and Bell Beaker Cultures had moved north into Jutland and the coasts of what are now Norway and Sweden. There they melded with descendants of the Funnel Beaker and Ertebølle people into a rich Bronze Age culture. The wealth and technical excellence of its bronze objects is impressive. Trade was important to this society. So was seacraft.Voyages linked Jutland and Scandia in one communicating web.....So Proto-Germanic in the end was crafted out of crisis. It seems that its final development was in the compact region of the Jastorf Culture....

Why did NOT more of these fine sea voyagers from Scandinavia make it to the British Isles (at least the U106 portion of them) during the Nordic Bronze Age?

An additional question relates to the Germanic homeland. I realize that the weather was good in Scandinavia during the Nordic Bronze Age, circa 1200 BC to 500 BC, but I don't think the weather was exceptionally bad in the German plains during that time. Why pick the Nordic Bronze Age territory as the homeland versus points south?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_German_Plain

Quote from: Wikipedia

The Jastorf culture is an Iron Age material culture in what is now north Germany, spanning the 6th to 1st centuries BC, forming the southern part of the Pre-Roman Iron Age. The culture evolved out of the Nordic Bronze Age, through influence from the Halstatt culture farther south. The cultures of the Pre-Roman Iron Age are sometimes hypothesized to be the origin of the Germanic languages.

I agree that there were some IE speakers in Scandinavia during the Nordic Bronze Age. How do we know where the main group of pre-Germanic IE speakers were? Could they have been a segment of Halstatt? or something else from the south/southeast of the initial Jastorf territory?

The reason I ask these things relates to possible alignments with Y haplogroups. P312 could have been the early IE speakers in Scandinavia with U106 coming later, from the south. This would fit better with diversity patterns and the lack of U106 in Britain, and apparently in the Nordwestblock in early periods (pre-Frisian/Anglo-Saxon era.) Of course, P312 seems to be of pre-Celtic/pre-Italic dialects so .....

Is it possible or probable that pre-Germanic IE speakers really come from the Northern German Plains or even slightly south? Possibly where some early U106 folks were.

Perhaps we should refer to the association of R1a with Kurgans and IE as Anatole Klyosov's R1a theory. Spencer Wells can probably take some credit as well.

The association of R1a with kurgans is a proven fact. Ancient DNA has been taken from kurgans (the burial mounds on the steppe) and found to be R1a. The wild notions of various parties built onto that fact are a quite different matter, and "Parochial interpretation of the Kurgan Theory" seems fine to me.

Why pick the Nordic Bronze Age territory as the homeland versus points south?

The key idea is the communicating group. Language evolution goes on within that group of people regularly talking to each other. National borders did not operate then. But cultural barriers (sometimes based on geography) did. Linguists have looked for a long-standing cultural barrier that could have generated a language split between the region heading for Celtic and the region heading (ultimately, a long way down the line) for Germanic. The Nordic Bronze Age seemed to fit that bill - as a starting point for dialect development. The weather only comes into this as an explanation for the yo-yo movement in and out of Scandinavia. The Jastorf Culture was clearly the result of farmers from the Nordic Bronze Age moving south onto the North European Plain and meeting up with the Halstatt Culture.

Then from the Jastorf area we can track movements in all directions, including back into Scandinavia, that fit the linguistic break-up of Proto-Germanic into daughter languages.

Where exactly U106 figures in this story I don't know. It could have been an early mover into Scandinavia in the Bronze Age, or it could have cropped up in the North European Plain and got absorbed by Jastorf. Can you really work this out? Wow!

.... The Jastorf Culture was clearly the result of farmers from the Nordic Bronze Age moving south onto the North European Plain and meeting up with the Halstatt Culture.

Then from the Jastorph area we can track movements in all directions, including back into Scandinavia, that fit the linguistic break-up of Proto-Germanic into daughter languages. ...

I think it is safe to assume the Halstatt culture was IE speaking. Can the same assumption be made safely about the farmers from the Nordic Bronze Age?

Is there a strong early influence of Balto-Slavic words on proto-Germanic? Are there any remnants of non-IE languages from the Nordic Bronze Age?

Perhaps R1a and P312 brought IE to Scandinavia and I1 folks, then U106 joined into the final formation with Jastorf, that then expanded up the Jutland and across the strait as well as a hard push straight east across Frisia and finally into England. ???

think it is safe to assume the Halstatt culture was IE speaking. Can the same assumption be made safely about the farmers from the Nordic Bronze Age?

Why not?

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Is there a strong early influence of Balto-Slavic words on proto-Germanic?

Proto-Germanic has proved a knotty problem to linguists, because of the complexity of its connections to other IE languages. This is discussed by Ringe, Warnow and Taylor 2002, pp. 110-1: The problem of Germanic. They conclude that the ancestor dialect was originally a near sister to Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian. In other words the people who eventually spoke it had remained in the rump of IE after the departure of those who went on to develop Celtic, etc. Later on in the development of Proto-Germanic (after its departure from the IE homeland) there was intensive contact with Celtic.

Quote

Perhaps R1a and P312 brought IE to Scandinavia and I1 folks, then U106 joined into the final formation with Jastorf, that then expanded up the Jutland and across the strait as well as a hard push straight east across Frisia and finally into England. ???

That is what I meant by the possibility that U106 was in the north European Plain and absorbed by Jastorf. But I'm not sure that we can tell that at the moment.

.... The Jastorf Culture was clearly the result of farmers from the Nordic Bronze Age moving south onto the North European Plain and meeting up with the Halstatt Culture.

Then from the Jastorph area we can track movements in all directions, including back into Scandinavia, that fit the linguistic break-up of Proto-Germanic into daughter languages. ...

I think it is safe to assume the Halstatt culture was IE speaking. Can the same assumption be made safely about the farmers from the Nordic Bronze Age?

Is there a strong early influence of Balto-Slavic words on proto-Germanic? Are there any remnants of non-IE languages from the Nordic Bronze Age?

Perhaps R1a and P312 brought IE to Scandinavia and I1 folks, then U106 joined into the final formation with Jastorf, that then expanded up the Jutland and across the strait as well as a hard push straight east across Frisia and finally into England. ???

I believe its usually assumed the Nordic Bronze Age was IE but the sound shifts that made it Germanic didnt happen until the end of it c. 500BC when the successor cultures of the Iron Age like Jastorf emerged. I am no expert but it was for long held that Germanic especially displays some sort of non-IE substrate.

I would think any theory that had P312 and U106 not being from the same language family at least would be hard to believe. I think we should bear in mind that only one Corded Ware sample is known (R1a) and while that is clear positive evidence it is hopeless in terms of negative evidence proving the absence of anything else. If we had 5 or 6 samples from a separate sites of one culture then we could maybe infer something but one sample proves nothing in terms of absence. Mike - I understand variance of U106 is not high in Scandinavia etc. Is this also true of p312 and subclades? Does variance suggest which R1b clades are earliest in the Germanic area (ie. Scandinavia, north Germany, Holland)?

I was tempted to give the standard caveat that we cannot assume anything, but just wondered why you thought one a safer assumption than the other. If we start from the presumption that the Copper/Bronze Age is the best bet for the spread of Indo-European languages, because of the remarkable degree of cultural unity in Europe in that period, then that fits the Nordic Bronze Age as well as the rest of the European Bronze Age. Both before and after the Bronze Age there was much more of a patchwork of cultures - not the sort of situation conducive to the spread over the whole continent of a new language family.

.... The Jastorf Culture was clearly the result of farmers from the Nordic Bronze Age moving south onto the North European Plain and meeting up with the Halstatt Culture.

Then from the Jastorph area we can track movements in all directions, including back into Scandinavia, that fit the linguistic break-up of Proto-Germanic into daughter languages. ...

I think it is safe to assume the Halstatt culture was IE speaking. Can the same assumption be made safely about the farmers from the Nordic Bronze Age?

Is there a strong early influence of Balto-Slavic words on proto-Germanic? Are there any remnants of non-IE languages from the Nordic Bronze Age?

Perhaps R1a and P312 brought IE to Scandinavia and I1 folks, then U106 joined into the final formation with Jastorf, that then expanded up the Jutland and across the strait as well as a hard push straight east across Frisia and finally into England. ???

I believe its usually assumed the Nordic Bronze Age was IE but the sound shifts that made it Germanic didnt happen until the end of it c. 500BC when the successor cultures of the Iron Age like Jastorf emerged. I am no expert but it was for long held that Germanic especially displays some sort of non-IE substrate.

I would think any theory that had P312 and U106 not being from the same language family at least would be hard to believe. I think we should bear in mind that only one Corded Ware sample is known (R1a) and while that is clear positive evidence it is hopeless in terms of negative evidence proving the absence of anything else. If we had 5 or 6 samples from a separate sites of one culture then we could maybe infer something but one sample proves nothing in terms of absence. Mike - I understand variance of U106 is not high in Scandinavia etc. Is this also true of p312 and subclades? Does variance suggest which R1b clades are earliest in the Germanic area (ie. Scandinavia, north Germany, Holland)?

What got me started on this is that U106 in England and the Low Countries have about the same variance as in Scandinavia. If U106 in was part of the original formation of proto-Germanic and pre-Germanic came from Scandinavia I'd expect U106 to have higher variance there. I'd also expect more U106 in the British Isles early on with Nordic Bronze Age sea voyagers.

Perhaps R1a and P312 brought IE to Scandinavia and I1 folks, then U106 joined into the final formation with Jastorf, that then expanded up the Jutland and across the strait as well as a hard push straight east across Frisia and finally into England. ???

Whilst P312 and R1a are bringing IE into Scandinavia, where exactly is U106 marking time for 4000 years?

If the Kurgan Theory is correct, then probably mostly U106 and I1 populations were converted to the obvious thrills of IE speech by intrepid and elite R1a Corded Ware Berlitz, Pimsleur, and Rosetta Stone language instructors. ;-)

Since Gimbutas hadn't heard of R1a1 in the 1950s, I take it that you refer to the "Parochial interpretation of the Kurgan Theory" that made a sudden appearance on another thread. I'd no idea what this meant, but I think I see the light now. This is code for the ravings of Rah-Rah-R1a1arians, yes? All very tiresome, but I can't think why anyone is taking them seriously.

I was mixing serious stuff with humor, but it has been my experience that by far most of those who are involved in genetic genealogy and who accept the idea that PIE originated on the Pontic-Caspian steppe believe that R1a is the paramount and original PIE y haplogroup. (It is so much easier just to refer to the Pontic-Caspian thing as the "Kurgan Theory".)

Jean, even you have said that R1b learned its PIE at the hands of R1a peoples.

Very few people would derive R1b from the P-C steppe. Mike may be one; Maciamo Hay of Eupedia might be another, but that is about it.